Secret of the Space Tyrant!

Kalmykia is a small Buddhist republic in the greater Russian Federation. For 17 years, the nation was ruled by President Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, a multi-millionaire who made his fortune in the privatization of the Russian auto industry after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Ilyumzhinov is also the head of the World Chess Federation and introduced compulsory chess-education in Kalmykian schools. His time as president was marked by ostentatious displays and charges of corruption. The people of Kalmykia remain the poorest in all of Russia, despite numerous expensive construction projects; most notably a still yet-to-be-completed "Chess City" which was intended to house and celebrate chess champions and facilitate competitions. In 1998, opposition journalist Larisa Yudina was found stabbed and bludgeoned to death after publishing articles critical of Ilyumzhinov. Her murderers were two former government aides to Ilyumzhinov, who promptly banned the publication of Yudina's newspaper. The organization Reporters without Borders currently rate Kalmykia as being "among the most repressive towards the media in the entire Russian Federation." If this wasn't enough, Ilyumzhinov also described having a friendly relationship with Libyan dictator Muammar al-Gaddafi and former Iraqi-dictator Saddam Hussien.

Despite these little controversies, Vladimir Putin, then president of Russia, seemed to think well of Ilyumzhinov. In 2002, after Putin abolished the direct election of regional leaders (with this power being relocated to the Russian presidency), he selected Ilyumshinov for another seven-year term. Ilyumzhinov's political future was assured, until 2010 when the Kalmykian president made a very serious gaffe on a televised interview.

Kirsan Ilyumzhinov announced that on September 17th, 1997, during a trip to Moscow, he was visited by aliens.

The abduction was a simple affair, really. As described by Ilyumzhinov, the aliens descended from the skies, took him from his apartment and brought him to "some star." Ilyumzhinov, fearing that he would be late for a meeting in Ukraine, asked the aliens if they could bring him back to Earth and they complied. During the voyage, Ilyumzhinov had the opportunity to talk at length with his newfound extraterrestrial friends and they implied that chess originated in outer space.

Shortly after the interview, Putin's successor President Dmitry Medvedev received a letter from an alarmed Russian MP Andre Lebedev, who asserted that Ilyumzhinov was unfit to rule Kalmykia. Rather than decrying Ilyumzhinov as delusional, Lebedev was primarily concerned that the Kalmykian president may have disclosed official secrets to the aliens and created a security risk for the Russian Federation. Lebedev went on to suggest that alien abduction protocol be drafted for government leaders to prevent breaches of sensitive information.

It was probably not a coincidence that after controlling Kalmykia since 1993, Ilyumzhinov announced that he would not run for another term. Medvedev's new appointed president of Kalmykia, Alexei Orlov, was installed into power on October 24th, 2010. Although he has lost his political power, Ilymzhinov continues to act as the president of the World Chess Federation. Chessplayers, it appears, are more familiar with insanity.

Would you like to know more?
-Read this article from the Guardian
-Read this article from the BBC
-Watch this interview with Illymzhinov

How Things Work: Russian Navy Edition

The Novgorod was built in 1874 by the Imperial Russian Navy. Its designer, Admiral Andrei Popov, believed that the unique circular shape of the vessel would give it the capacity to carry much heavier guns that other ships of its size, due to the greater displacement of water. It was also intended to have uncommon stability while fighting coastal battles.

As it happened, the ship was an astounding failure of design. Thanks to its odd shape, manuveribility was difficult and smooth-sailing was impossible, as the Novgorod was tossed about by even mild waves. The force of its own cannons was sufficient to spend the ship spinning in the water, and even the addition of special rudders couldn't fully correct the problem.

The ship proved to be wildly impractical in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877. In the end, the Novgorod was used infrequently as a coast patrol-boat, before finally being scrapped in 1912.

But don't take my word for it!

You can read about it in a book!

Beauty! Youth! Blood-sucking Parasites!

Moscow is home to a new therapy that promises to refresh and rejuvenate unlike anything else available. If that sounds intriguing to you, then you might think otherwise once you hear that it is based out of the International Leech Center, and the process involves the placement of sanitary, farm-raised leeches on the body to drain one's blood.

Leeches have been used in medicine since the middle ages, but it's only recently that they've been employed for anything practical, in reducing unwanted coagulation during surgeries. The saliva of the leech contains tiny amounts of a chemical called hirudin, which prevents blood clots from forming. The International Leech Center asserts that hirudin offers therapeutic effects for everything from one's skin to one's psychology. Children have been brought to the Center in hopes that the leeches can somehow correct hyperactivity (possibly through drinking their blood away until they're left in a stupor).

The majority of their clients, however, are women hoping to save their bodies from the inevitable effects of aging. In these cases, the leeches placed on the client's cheeks and forehead are burst, giving the client a warm, facial rinse in their own blood. One such leech-devotee is actress Demi Moore (which is bizarrely ironic given that this was one of her first films), who has gone on Letterman to regale a nauseated audience about the benefits of having one's body covered in blood-thirsty aquatic worms. Meanwhile several doctors have expressed skepticism about the practice, although this has had little effect on business. On the contrary, leech-breeding continues to be a highly profitable enterprise in Russia and new farms are being opened to meet the increased demand. All of this serves to highlight the great lengths people will go to maintain their appearance.

We at the Hyper Kitchen like you just the way you are.

Would you like to know more?
-Visit the International Leech Center
-See the interior of a leech farm with this series of photos (safe for the squeamish)
-Read this article from SkyNews

Moscow's Devolution Dogs

While you'd be hard pressed to find a major city without stray dogs, Moscow is somewhat famous for them. It seems that they've been around for as long as the city has existed, although they were first formally acknowledged in the late 1800's by famous Muscovite journalist Vladimir Gilyarovsky. During the days of the Soviet Union, the dogs were actively captured and killed by patrolmen. Some avoided death, but instead became participants in the Soviet space program. 57 strays were launched into outer space from 1951 to 1966.

After perestroika ushered in economic and political reforms in 1987, the dog-catching was ultimately done away with. This, combined with a new abundance of food that indirectly resulted from perestroika, resulted in a population explosion. Currently there is thought to be around 35,000 of them; 500 of which live within Moscow's metro subway stations (and around 20 of these dogs have learned to make use of the trains).

Biologist Andrei Poyarkov has been studying the stray dogs of Moscow since 1974, originally surveying the 100 dogs that dwelled within an area of 6.2 square miles near his home. Since that time, his investigation as broadened to cover the entire city. Over the years, Poyarkov has observed that these dogs are steadily losing the traits that were bred into them over the centuries by humans and are returning to a state similar to pre-domestication. While they retain special adaptations for surviving in their unique urban environment, they no longer interact with humans in the ways that we are accustomed to.

Poyarkov has documented four distinct classes of stray dogs, determined by their habitat. Those that live around buildings with security guards and groundsmen (such as hospitals and warehouses) are naturally the most comfortable with people. They often form a bond with the guards and respond to commands. Such behavior cannot be seen in the dogs that live within the heart of the city, which display indifference, but retain a keen insight of the human mind which they exploit regularly to get food. They target specific people for begging, knowing that old ladies are most likely to give them hand-outs.

The strays that form packs are even further removed from conventional dogs. They have minimal relations with people and rely upon scavenging for food, finding meals in Moscow's garbage bins. Finally, there are the dogs that live in the wooded areas and industrial parks that feed upon vermin and unlucky cats. These are truly feral and while they typically are not aggressive towards people, they avoid contact. They are nocturnal, taking advantage of the empty night-time streets.

While killing strays became illegal eight years ago, the city government has taken efforts to keep the population under control. Spaying and neutering pets isn't customary in Moscow, and the ranks of dogs are continually replenished thanks to hundreds of unwanted, abandoned pets. Modern dog-catchers bring the dogs to be sterilized and housed in animal shelters. There is a problem with insufficient adoption, and those dogs that are taken in as pets often don't take well to living in confined spaces.

However, by and large, the stray dogs aren't viewed as a pressing public dilemma. Moscow's attitude towards the dogs ranges from the ambivalent to the amicable. Meanwhile, foreigners regard the dogs with a mixture of confusion and amusement.

Would you like to know more?

-Read this article from the Financial Times

-Read this article from the Wall Street Journal

Even Hell Has Its Heroes

This is a tragic story.

When the Chernobyl reactor exploded in April of 1986, the Soviet Union at first tried to conceal the event, informing the citizens that "an accident had occurred" in one of the reactors, all while evacuating entire towns. It quickly became clear that the enormity of what had happened could not be hidden.

When the reactor exploded, it threw a two thousand ton reactor lid into the air. The explosion released a cloud of Strontium-90 and radioactive debris, carried by the strong winds across the region of Pripyat. The intensity of the fallout was forty thousand percent greater than that released during the detonation of the Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima.

The accident had to be contained in order to prevent radioactivity from contaminating other areas of Ukraine and Belarus. A group of eight hundred thousand men and women was assembled, comprised of soldiers, firefighters, coal miners, demolition experts, medical workers, and a Civil Defense brigade. Clad in protective suits, they were charged with redirecting the flowing radioactive coolant water to prevent it from leeching into the region's ground water, as well as carrying all the debris to the remains of the Chernobyl plant, where it could be covered in concrete.

They were called the Liquidators, and sometimes Bio-Robots.

They knew that they had been deemed expendable.

Unable to work more than forty seconds at a time due to the hazardous environment, they would haul a cart-load of concrete and scrap metal a few meters and then run away, to be replaced by another worker. Eventually it was all piled high in the shell of Chernobyl, whereupon helicopters blanketed the site in lead and boric acid. The entire process took eight months, and when completed the resulting structure was finally sealed in what was called "the Sarcophagus." For many of the Liquidators, its construction was their final act.

The entire affected area is a vast wasteland of crumbling apartment complexes and abandoned vehicles, all soaking in radioactivity. It is cordoned off and referred to as the "Zone of Alienation." Of those that worked to contain the site, six hundred thousand suffered from radiation poisoning. Sixty thousand of those men and women perished, and one hundred sixty five thousand are permanently disabled from their injuries. For their sacrifice, they received minimal health care and compensation, with soldiers often being denied anything altogether as they were not "salaried workers."

In 2006, the Liquidators finally received a gesture of gratitude in the form of a statue honoring them in a Moscow Cemetery. It provides a somber tribute to those endured a pocket apocalypse.